GitHub Review Shows JavaScript, Learning Are Top Trends in 2018

GitHub still rules the open source space, and its year-end reflection on 2018 sheds some light on what’s in store for 2019 and beyond.

The largest takeaway: GitHub is growing quickly. It says 2018 brought more new users than its first six years combined, and it now hosts over 100 million repositories.

GitHub also analyzed which projects took off fastest over the past year. “We pulled the top projects open sourced in 2018 by the number of stars the project received in its first 28 days being public and by the number of unique contributors to the project in the first 28 days being public,” it wrote in a blog post.

Oddly enough, a TypeScript project named ‘deno’ reigned supreme. In its first 28 days, deno amassed over 20,000 stars. A JavaScript algorithms repo was second place, eking past anotherJavaScript repo named ’33-js-concepts’.

The ‘concepts’ repo shows GitHub’s strong lean into education. While many repos exist on Github simply so developers have somewhere to host code, most are purposeful, and often aimed at a learning audience. In the top ten fastest-growing open source repos of 2018, three are dedicated to learning concepts or core competencies. It suggests many of those new users GitHub bragged about are students or people otherwise new to tech.

The open source space shifted a bit in late 2018. In September, GitHub published its Octoverse findings, a large annual review of open source and projects on GitHub. As far as technologies are concerned, React and Android reigned supreme then, followed by node.js, Docker, and iOS.

Now, node.js is in the top slot, just above React. The .NET framework came out of absolutely nowhere to find itself in the number-three spot, with Docker and Android rounding out the top five. Machine learning, ‘API,’ iOS, cli, and vue round out the top ten.

Overall, it’s been quite the year for GitHub. Microsoft killed a competing product and purchased GitHub for $7.5 billion… then .NET somehow got popular in open source (we kid, but put on your tinfoil hat anyway). Its new Actions tool is a pretty direct and profound way to achieve CI without looping in outside forces, and it really could change how you use open source tools moving forward.

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